Column 02 – Hopes and Dreams by The FlyLady, Marla Cilley

What is hope anyway? What happens when we don’t have hope in our lives? Today I read my morning meditation and there was a reference to hope. That once the hope is realized; it is not hope anymore.

Without hope we find ourselves in a sad way. My birthday is January 11th and 111 is a special number to me. One day I decided to look up those numbers. I have been trying to put this together for weeks now and today it all came clear in one of my favorite Bible verses. Hebrews 11:1, here is what I found. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

We all need something to hope for; this is our dreams. We have the ability to make our dreams come true. My friend Rita Davenport taught me about hope; what good are low hopes! We need to Dream Big and visualize those dreams in our minds eye! I like to keep my dreams in front of face. I use my computer to do this. I put pictures of my dreams as my computer screen saver. This way when I walk away from my computer and come back to it; I see those dreams and my hope is energized.

I don’t allow any negativity to slip in and beat me up. I deserve to have my dreams come true! My hope keeps those dreams alive. Without hope we lose our will to go from one day to the next. Hope and faith are connected. Hope is the dream and faith is the affirmation that those dreams will happen. We see it; we feel it and we can experience it in our imaginations and before we know it those dreams become a reality!

We have to watch our perfectionism in this process. We want what we want and we want it now! Anything worth having is worth working for and we have to learn to take babysteps to get to where we want to be. Where do you want to be? Do you know or have you stuffed those dreams into a deep hole?

Then we have our perfectionism to cause us to give up when things are not happening fast enough. This is when we just throw in the towel because our dreams seem too out of reach. As Rita and Ryan Shupe would say, “What good are low hopes? Dream Big!

Everyone asks why we have to shine our sinks to get started. It is really quite simple; that shiny sink is a ray of hope for you! Something small that can grow into your dream! Right now we struggle with just trying to find our keys. As the clutter and chaos disappear one babystep at a time we give ourselves the freedom to Dream Big. I never knew that I could be an author or anything other than someone who was beaten down by life. With each new habit I acquired, I found a little bit more of me! I didn’t set out to be the FlyLady. I just wanted to be nice to myself. That became the fuel for my routines.

In the beginning all I knew was there had to be something more than just surviving and that God had something for me to do. Each new habit along with every item I got rid of uncovered my purpose in the deep hole. It wasn’t long until I could feel hope blossom inside of me.

That hope is still there today! Where is your hope? I have faith that my dreams will come true. It only takes a little mustard seed of faith to see those dreams become a reality.